


hold to your promise, hold to the line

by eneiryu



Series: the ruins of a softer world [5]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: As the Case May Be, Black Versus White, M/M, Or Gold Versus Blue, The Things We Do and Don't Mourn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-27
Updated: 2019-12-27
Packaged: 2021-02-25 23:02:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,055
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21993394
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eneiryu/pseuds/eneiryu
Summary: As much as he maybe wishes he didn’t, Theo knows what it’s like to kill people. Liam—didn’t use to.
Relationships: Liam Dunbar/Theo Raeken
Series: the ruins of a softer world [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1171352
Comments: 53
Kudos: 217





	hold to your promise, hold to the line

**Author's Note:**

> Credit to a commenter who pointed out that it was a little weird that no one, at all, had a conversation about the fact that Liam killed Monroe in this universe. They were right.
> 
> Translation into русский by aquarellin here: [ hold to your promise, hold to the line](https://ficbook.net/readfic/9780446).

Theo realizes what’s happening the third time he catches Liam studying the reflection of his flared eyes instead of whatever’s going on around him.

The problem is, Liam notices him noticing; he goes instantly rigid. “I have to get to school,” he announces suddenly, and drops the spoon whose rounded back he’d been staring at into his bowl of now-soggy cereal as he shoves back from the table, and stands. 

“Liam,” Theo tries, but Liam’s already out of the room; Theo can hear him banging around as he shoves his feet into his shoes in the living room, as he picks up his backpack. 

For a moment Theo considers going after him, but the look of warning on Liam’s face hadn’t been hard to interpret. Sighing, Theo tilts his head briefly back and then refocuses on his own bowl of cereal, mechanically shoveling bites of it into his mouth until it’s empty, and he can tip the bowl back to drink the last dregs of milk and broken bits of corn flakes. 

Mrs. Geyer comes into the kitchen just as Theo is pushing back from the table and reaching for both his bowl and Liam’s. “That about you?” She asks curiously, tilting her head towards the front door.

Theo winces as he hears it slam. ”Not as far as I know,” He assures her, though even as he says it, he knows it’s—more complicated than that. Mrs. Geyer gives him a sympathetic smile and opens the fridge to start putting together her lunch for work.

Theo hesitates for a second, still stood by the table and with his and Liam’s bowls awkwardly in hand, and then he mentally prods himself into moving and heads for the sink. “Hey, thanks for letting me stay over last night,” he says to his scrubbing fingers as he rinses out their bowls. “I should have been paying more attention to the time, but we lost track of it with the movie, and—”

He cuts off when Mrs. Geyer puts a gentle hand on his shoulder and leans around him to get at a travel mug lid drying on a towel next to the sink. “Don’t worry about it,” she tells him, squeezing his shoulder once before leaning back. “You’re welcome here any time, you know that.”

Theo bites his lip and doesn’t respond, though he sneaks a glance at her as he shuts off the water and reaches for the dishwasher. She’s focused on screwing the lid onto her travel mug and sliding it into her bag, but Theo still looks away quickly, feeling his cheeks heat. Luckily he’s got an ironclad excuse for not responding; he picks up his and Liam’s bowls and concentrates on sliding them into the dishwasher one by one, taking unnecessary, extra care as he drops their spoons into the silverware rack. 

He’s also a little too successful at distracting himself; he jumps when Mrs. Geyer suddenly reappears at his side and presses a quick, dry kiss to his cheek. “Let me know if I need to remind my son about the importance of honest communication, yes? I usually try to give him only a few days of silent sulking before prying whatever it is out of him.”

Theo’s lips twitch. “I’ll keep you updated.”

Mrs. Geyer smiles back at him, and then she’s grabbing her lunch and keys and is out the door, leaving Theo alone in the Geyer-Dunbar kitchen. Theo hesitates for a moment, and then he braces his hands on the counter and focuses on the window over the sink. 

His eyes are golden in the reflection when he flares them, just like Liam’s had been. Theo sighs, and blinks away the shift, and goes to start his day.

\---

Theo doesn’t see Liam for the next few days—he suddenly becomes inescapably busy. 

Theo lets Liam avoid him, and—forcing down his own worry, and the childish, unhappy feeling in his chest that _misses_ him—focuses instead on working with Derek, Argent, and Deaton to pool their collective knowledge of western United States packs to help prepare Scott for what he’d started calling, because he is an unapologetically _giant_ dork, the Diplomacy Grand Tour. With the Monroe situation finally—for lack of a better term—resolved, Argent and Deaton had recommended it: formalizing the new alliances Scott and the hunting party had made, and reestablishing the old Hale alliances that had withered after the Hale fire, would mean that the next time something slithered its way into Beacon Hills, they wouldn’t have to face it alone.

It’d also let Scott and Malia—and the high school crew, too, once they graduated—finally go off to their long-delayed college plans. Scott had been approaching that reality with an infectious sort of excitement, bouncing around in a U.C. Davis sweatshirt and benignly annoying Theo and Derek and Argent and Deaton as they tried to concentrate. Derek’s memories were more than a little hazy, and Argent’s brief retirement from hunting had caused some of his information to go stale, but between Deaton’s and Theo’s extensive pools of knowledge—Theo forcing down helpless shudders, the feel of damp breath on the back of his neck as the Surgeon, or the Pathologist, or the Geneticist stood expectantly behind him—tended to make up for a lot of the gaps, and they’d finally managed to start pulling together a solid plan. 

“Shohreh first, clearly,” Argent says, tapping at Yreka on the replacement wall map that he’d bought Theo. “With her support, the rest of the California packs should be straightforward. Then Ailene Storo in Chemult—”

“No, Denio,” Theo interrupts from his place on the couch, Stiles’ ridiculous GWU stress ball in his hands, at the same time that Deaton suggests serenely, “I’d recommend obtaining Rosalia’s support first.”

Argent frowns. “Her pack’s half the size of Ailene’s.”

“Yeah, but Ailene spent her childhood summers in Denio with the now-alphas of the Lakeview and Carson City packs, the latter of whom is Rosalia’s daughter,” Derek speaks up, squinting some into the middle-distance as he apparently tries to fully dig up the details of the memory. “Rosalia’s pack may be small, but she’s the lynchpin for several other packs. She decides not to pursue a formal alliance, Scott’s going to have a tough time gaining the support of most of the Nevada-southern Idaho packs.”

He looks to Deaton to double-check his analysis; Deaton nods. “Rosalia is a well-respected alpha, and her voice will carry a lot of weight.”

Argent nods, and turns for his tablet left resting on Theo’s table to update the running list of notes he’d been keeping. “Okay. Yreka, then Denio. Straight to Chemult after that, or is there somewhere else Scott should stop first?”

Argent and Deaton leave a few hours later, but Derek lingers. Theo has a pretty good idea _why_ , and so he’s already smirking to himself as he pushes himself up off the couch and heads into his kitchen, mind already switching tracks from western U.S. pack histories to how much curry powder he _wants_ versus how much he _has_. And Derek does follow him, trailing after him with what Theo originally interprets as a really genuinely half-assed attempt at nonchalance, and turns out to be something else altogether.

“You talked to Liam recently?” He asks; Theo freezes in the middle of pulling a package of chicken breasts out of the fridge. 

He forces himself to relax quickly, and twists around to drop the chicken on the island behind him as he ducks back into the fridge for a container of plain yogurt. “I think you know the answer to that,” he answers mildly, keeping his eyes on his hands instead of on Derek, for all that it matters; he can smell the quick dip to Derek’s scent just fine.

Anyway, he still manages to catch Derek’s wince when he straightens back up to close the fridge door and set the yogurt next to the chicken. “Yeah,” he agrees reluctantly. “Sorry.” He gives Theo a sympathetic half-quirk of a grimace.

Theo shrugs, and focuses on turning for his cabinets so he doesn’t have to focus on the way that Derek’s quiet, watchful attention is setting the cramped thing in his chest—the one that already desperately misses Liam, idiotically enough; Theo saw him _three days ago_ —to twisting harder. “I assume you’re not asking just to ask?” Theo eventually prompts over the clacking of glass jars as he sorts through his spices looking for the ones he needs.

Derek hums absently. “He came by my apartment two nights ago. I think you were out on a case with the Sheriff—”

“I’m sure I was,” Theo mutters under his breath.

“—and he wanted to know about, well,” he trails off inexplicably and Theo has no idea what he means, but when he glances over at Derek in confusion Derek is waving the fingers of one hand demonstrably next to one of his shifted eyes.

His _blue_ shifted eyes.

Theo exhales quietly, and closes his own eyes briefly. Flares them, once he’s sure his eyelids are shut and his face is tilted back away from Derek’s, but drops the shift before he blinks them back open. Forcing himself to ignore the churning in his own gut, Theo reaches back into the cabinet, nudging glass jars out of the way until the backs of his fingers bump up against the container of curry he’d been looking for.

“What’d you tell him?” Theo finally asks, taking the curry out. He drops it next to the other spices he’d pulled out and then gathers them all up as he shoulders the cabinet door closed, turning to face the island—and therefore Derek, who’d been hovering just inside the kitchen doorway—before setting them down next to the chicken and yogurt.

Derek shrugs. “Same thing I’d been told. A werewolf’s eyes change color if they take the life of an innocent. He—” Derek hesitates, cutting himself off with an abrupt, harsh noise. Theo stops pretending to be interested in the ingredients in front of him and looks up. “He didn’t seem satisfied,” Derek concludes quietly, and meet’s Theo’s eyes again, already grimacing.

“I’m sure he wasn’t,” Theo just agrees, sighing and bending over the counter to drop his head into his hands, his elbows braced on the edge. He scrubs his hands over his face and then rakes his fingers back through his hair before bringing them back around, in front of his mouth.

“You going to talk to him?” Derek asks, sounding a mix of curious and just the slightest bit reproving, because what he clearly _means_ is: _why haven’t you_ already _talked to him?_

Theo straightens back up and braces his palms on the counter instead. “Yeah, I’ll talk to him,” Theo tells him, deliberately side-stepping Derek’s _actual_ question. “I’ll talk to him as soon as he’s willing to talk to _me_.”

Derek’s head tips and he gets a particular, narrow-eyed and twisted-mouth look on his face that pricks at Theo; it’s not like it’s hard to recognize undiluted _skepticism_. “What is _that_ look for?” Theo demands.

“Oh, you know,” Derek explains, arms crossing loosely over his chest as he leans against the island. “It’s just, when I think of two people who are _really great—_ ” Theo could really do without the high, bubble-headed sarcasm layered thick in those two words, “—at respecting each other’s boundaries, I always think of _you_ and _Liam_.”

Theo gives him an incredulous look. “Yeah, okay, _pot_ ,” He shoots back, gesturing first at Derek and then at himself in a clear _kettle_. He twists to jerk open a drawer in the cabinets behind him so he can retrieve a set of measuring spoons. “Exactly _how many_ times did Stiles break into your loft, or you into his Jeep?” 

Derek looks serenely unmoved by Theo’s excellent point. “Yeah, so why aren’t you following our example and breaking into Liam’s house?”

“Because his parents are there,” Theo mutters petulantly, busying himself with retrieving a small bowl that he can use to mix the spices he needs.

He still catches Derek’s eye-roll. “Theo, c’mon.”

Theo gives up on trying to act unbothered and shoves away from the island with a bitten-off noise, instead taking a few steps back until he can brace himself against the counter behind himself; Derek watches, eyebrows raised. “This isn’t about _pride_ , or whatever, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Theo tells him, a little snappishly. “I’m not avoiding him because he’s avoiding me.”

Derek cocks his head, clearly waiting. Theo sighs roughly and looks away from him, trying to think how best to explain.

“Look. It doesn’t matter if _I_ am willing to talk to _him_ ,” he finally settles on, meeting Derek’s curious eyes again. “ _He_ has to be willing to talk to _me_. I try cornering him while it’s still the other way around and he isn’t going to hear anything I say.”

And that’s true. It is absolutely, one-hundred percent _true_ , but it’s also not the only reason that Theo has resisted every selfish urge he’s had to—as Derek so helpfully pointed out—break into Liam’s house. To force his way right past Liam’s boundaries, just like he and Liam have always done. Theo tips his head down, and doesn’t let his own eyes—his own _golden_ eyes flare—no matter how much he wants to.

When he finally forces his gaze blinking back up, Derek is watching him like he knows exactly what Theo’s thinking. But he also drops it. He nods simply, and looks away, and drops it. Theo lets out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding.

But Derek also doesn’t leave.

Theo feels amusement start to bubble in his chest, displacing some of the tight ball of feeling that had lodged up underneath his throat. “Something else you needed?” He inquires dryly.

Derek pretends—badly, and with no particular effort to do it any other way—to think it over. “You’re making curry, right?” He replies innocently. “I’ll chop.” 

He holds up a hand, and flexes it demonstrably. Theo rolls his eyes, but leans sideways to snag an onion from the bowl of produce on the counter next to him, and tosses it to Derek.

“Don’t chop that on the counter, you heathen,” Theo orders. “I’ll grab you a cutting board.”

\---

In Theo’s defense, the eavesdropping genuinely starts out as an accident. 

Before he’d left for his own Emissary Diplomacy Grand Tour—“I’m going on _vacation_ to see _friends_ , Mr. Dunbar,” Deaton had sighed longsufferingly, “not to gather allies for war”—Deaton had given Alec a collection of journals kept by various long-dead alphas, as well as a handful of volumes on werewolf pack histories and supernatural lore written by even longer-dead emissaries, and which Alec had sworn up and down the animal clinic halls to give to Scott when they went on their next one-on-one training session. Theo had admired the optimism of the exchange, if not the practicality of it, because—surprising exactly no one, and Theo least of all—Alec had completely forgotten about the box of carefully-packed tomes. 

(“Oh, shit,” Alec had said blankly, staring down at the box set deliberately by his front door, and where he would _theoretically_ see and remember it. He’d already been in his scrubs for his first shift back since Deaton’s return, and he’d gone a guilty sort of pale as he’d looked desperately up at Theo, standing in the doorway with his truck keys already in his hands.

Theo had rolled his eyes. “Yes, Alec, I will take them over to the McCall’s so that you strictly speaking _won’t_ be lying when you tell Deaton you gave them to Scott,” he’d assured Alec dryly, though not unkindly; he’d wanted to ask about borrowing some of them, anyway.

“Thanks, Theo,” Alec had breathed, and then—of course—had scuttled off _without the box_.)

It’s shockingly heavy—maybe to be expected, given that half the books in it are leather-bound, thick-paper-stocked monstrosities—and Theo needs both hands to keep control of the thing without accidentally tipping it. It means that when he gets to the McCall house and finds the door unlocked and no one responding to his admittedly less-than-effective knocking—he doesn’t have _hands_ , okay, and he gets the feeling Ms. McCall will appear from the ether and kill him if he kicks her door—he just heads in. He’d call out—Scott’s home, he can tell from his scent _and_ from the reflexive tug at the base of his spine that says his alpha’s close by—but he’d less-than-intelligently clamped the leather keychain attached to his keys between his teeth rather than tucking them back into his pocket as he’d reached for the box before hopping out of his truck, so he doesn’t have a working _tongue_ currently, either.

That’s his second mistake; his third is when he finally tags the second heartbeat that’s with Scott and doesn’t immediately turn the hell around.

“Hey, can I ask you something?” Liam asks, sounding muffled and far away because he and Scott are—Theo stretching out his hearing reflexively to check from his place frozen just inside the front door—upstairs in Scott’s bedroom.

“Yeah, of course,” Scott replies, sounding benignly distracted as he apparently digs around his dresser for something.

“What would you…” Liam starts, and then trails off—Theo feels his pulse jump up into his throat, and then start to speed—before starting again. “Do you know… Have you ever…” He hesitates again, and then suddenly speaks all in a furious rush, “Have you ever thought about what you would have done if I hadn’t killed Monroe?”

Scott stops whatever he’d been doing; Theo can’t see his face but he can hear the sudden absence of rummaging. Theo’s fingers tighten around the edge of the box in his hands and his teeth clench harder around the keychain still _idiotically_ clamped between them; he considers spitting it out for a split-second before immediately rejecting that move, because the racket of his falling keys would sound approximately like machine gun fire going off in the pin-drop silence that had fallen. _Turn around, Theo_ , his better sense orders. _Turn around_ right now.

But Theo doesn’t move.

“Oh. Oh, right, well,” Scott finally says, not sounding hesitant so much as _careful_ ; clearly trying to pick his words. Clearly turning over each one in his mental hands before he lets it past the gatekeepers of his teeth. There’s a distinctive squeak; Scott sitting down on his mattress. “Yeah, I’ve thought about it.”

“And?” Even from a floor down and several rooms away, Theo can hear the tightly-controlled tension in Liam’s voice. 

Scott doesn’t answer right away. Theo feels the muscles between his shoulder-blades winching tight, and then winching _tighter_ when he thinks about how tight the muscles of _Liam’s_ back must be. But: “I would have tried to capture her,” Scott finally answers quietly. “Her and her people, so that they could be turned over to the Sheriff and my dad.”

Theo flinches, and not just because he can hear the tiny hitch to Liam’s breathing. 

But Scott must hear the same thing, because he hurries to clarify, “I would have _tried_ , but…” He sighs, and Theo hears a scratching rasp that is almost definitely Scott scrubbing the heels of his palms over his late-day stubble. “But I’m not naive enough to believe that it—that it would have been that simple.”

“...right,” Liam agrees after a long, drawn-out second. “Right, of course.”

 _Now’s_ the time for Theo to spit out his keys, and call out Scott’s name, and pretend—convincingly, one of those rare times when Theo’s glad for his _less than conventional_ upbringing—that he’d literally just walked in the door. He could have guessed the entirety of the contents of Scott’s and Liam’s conversation so far and so the invasion of their privacy seems—Theo recognizing the well-worn feeling of _stretching the truth_ , even as he keeps thinking it—minimized, somehow; more like something that Theo could in good-faith claim was an accident compounded by his genuine concern for Liam lately. 

But before he can make up his mind, Scott speaks. “Hey. Hey, Liam, c’mon,” he chastises gently, and Theo hears another series of squeaks as Scott apparently shifts on his mattress and—Theo squinting as he tries to picture the room—pulls Liam down next to him. “Talk to me. Or,” he hesitates, and Theo feels his attention snap taut as he waits, “or talk to _someone_ , because if you thought you were pulling off some kind of long con the last few days with your sudden dedication to your high school GPA, you, uh. You haven’t been.”

The attempt at humor pays off; Liam snorts, quietly. The mattress squeaks again and Theo is almost _positive_ —from long exposure to Liam’s habits, and unconscious mannerisms—that Liam had just leaned forward and dropped his head into his hands, his elbows braced on his spread knees. Scott—and Theo—wait.

“I don’t know, Scott,” he confesses quietly; quietly enough that Theo has to deliberately sharpen his hearing to fully catch it. “It’s just…” He hesitates, and then picks up again after a few seconds, “It’s been a couple of weeks, you know? And at first everything was so insane as—as—” 

As everyone rushed Theo to the hospital in the slim hope of saving his life, and then as everyone confessed the existence of the supernatural—and their places in it—to their unknowing families, and then as piece, by piece, by piece, the pack and the town slowly cleaned up Monroe’s mess and pulled themselves and each other back together; Theo swallows.

“—and anyway, I just…I hadn’t really _realized_ …It hadn’t really _hit me_ …” Another hesitation, and then: “But, well.” 

There’s another stretch of silence, and Theo doesn’t know what’s happening in it—no context clues to fill him in—and then Scott exhales out heavily as _he_ apparently figures out what Liam means.

“I don’t think it’s that simple, Liam,” Scott says, gently. 

Liam scoffs. “Why, because a werewolf’s eyes only change color when they take an _innocent_ life?” He sneers, though Theo doesn’t think the tone is directed at Scott or Derek a few nights ago or even at the arcane rules of werewolf biology. “That’s bullshit. That’s just some stupid fucking _loophole—_ ”

“Liam,” Scott interrupts, firmly if still gently. “It’s not that simple. You remember what happened with Donovan? Stiles—”

But Liam doesn’t let him finish. “Stiles killed Donovan in self-defense,” He argues, voice as simultaneously hard and brittle as chipping stone.

“And you didn’t?” Scott shoots back. “Liam, Monroe and her men had already killed dozens of people. She was _literally_ in the process of torturing Theo to death.”

Theo flinches bodily, and then freezes—the keys in his mouth jingling with the movement—but Scott and Liam must be too distracted to hear it because Liam just bites off a harsh, frustrated noise.

“That’s not _self-defense_ , that’s—” He spits out, and Theo feels something in his chest tug _hard_ at the clear undercurrent of distress in his voice.

“ _Liam_ ,” Scott cuts him off. “You’re deliberately missing my point. There’s more to self-defense than just protecting yourself, protecting _others_ is—”

“But what if it wasn’t about protecting anyone!” Liam interrupts, all but shouting it now. “I, I mean,” Liam stutters out into the sudden, surprised silence that falls. “But what if it wasn’t _just_ about protecting anyone?”

Theo’s holding his breath, he realizes. He’s been holding it for a while, apparently, at least based on the burning in his lungs. But he doesn’t let it out, too afraid of missing Scott’s response; too desperate to hear what the True Alpha has to say.

But he doesn’t get the chance.

“Theo?” Ms. McCall says, stood framed in the front doorway and squinting at him in confusion; Theo had been so wrapped up in listening to Scott and Liam that he’d somehow missed the front door opening, apparently. “What the hell are you doing just standing in the middle of my living room?”

 _Shit_ , Theo thinks, testing the silence that’s fallen upstairs and preemptively wincing. But out-loud he just finally spits out his keys and then somehow manages to paste a smile on his face, gesturing with the box in his hands. “Deaton,” he explains, “He gave these to Alec to give to Scott, but, well.”

He says it loudly enough that Scott and Liam—now coming down the upstairs hallway towards the stairs, based on the steady creak of footsteps—can hear him, too. It isn’t going to let him get away with _shit_ , which he knows before he even bothers saying it and Ms. McCall figures out shortly afterwards, her eyes flicking up the stairs and apparently catching sight of the sour look on Liam’s face. She shoots an apologetic grimace at Theo, clearly having correctly interpreted the situation, and Theo just gives her a barely perceptible shrug; he’d made this particular bed, and he had no doubt Liam was going to make him lie in it. 

“Oh, hey. Deaton mentioned he’d given some books to Alec for me, but I kept forgetting to ask Alec for them,” Scott jumps in brightly, clearly trying to diffuse some of the tension in the air as Liam glares at Theo and doesn’t bother trying to hide it. “Thanks for bringing them by.”

“Yeah, of cour—” Theo starts to say, hefting the box some so he can transfer it to the arms Scott has held out.

He doesn’t get to finish. “I’ve gotta go,” Liam suddenly says, and starts heading for the still-open door behind Ms. McCall, and shoving past Theo as he goes. 

“But, wait,” Scott argues, he and Theo frozen mid-exchange of the box full of books. “I thought I was giving you a ride back to your—”

“It’s fine,” Liam cuts him off harshly, and without turning around. He gives Ms. McCall a close-mouthed smile as he passes her, clearly trying not to be rude and just barely managing it. “I’ll walk.”

“But,” Scott tries again, but it doesn’t matter; Liam is already out the door and gone.

Theo exhales heavily and finishes pressing the box of books into Scott’s arms so that he can step back and rake his hands back through his hair, leaving them clenched around the back of his skull as he closes his eyes and stretches out of his hearing, listening for the steadily-receding tromp of Liam’s angry stride. He opens them back up when he hears the front door click shut.

“Sorry,” Ms. McCall tells him, sounding genuinely contrite.

“Nah,” Theo demurs, dropping his hands and giving her a quirk of a half-smile. “This one’s pretty clearly my own fault.” He transfers the half-smile to Scott as he reaches forward and retrieves his fallen keys from inside the box, though it becomes something of a grimace as Scott gives him a narrow-eyed look.

“Eavesdropping, huh?” He says mildly, but there’s a pretty firm rebuke in his words. “I thought we’d broken you of that habit.”

Theo flinches, and hard. “Sorry,” He says, and means it.

The expression on Scott’s face softens, some. “He’s still not talking to you?” Theo shakes his head, and Scott looks up, and out, towards where Liam had disappeared. “I could talk to—”

“No,” Theo interrupts, cutting him off. He gives Scott another of those pathetic half-smiles when Scott glances back over at him. “Thank you, but—but no.”

Scott studies him for a few seconds longer, and then nods. Seemingly recognizing the end of the situation she’d accidentally stumbled into, Ms. McCall gives Theo one last sympathetic smile as she wraps one arm around him in a quick half-hug, and then she ducks around them both—stopping to kiss Scott on the cheek—to head upstairs. Scott and Theo both watch her go for a moment, and then Scott looks back at Theo and gestures with the box in his arms.

“Did you look through these, at all? Any recommendations? Deaton suggested starting with the pack history written by Shohreh’s great-great-grandmother’s emissary. He said it’d lay a good foundation for the others.”

“I’d go with the Olympia pack alpha’s journal next,” Theo replies, gratefully seizing on the change of subject that Scott’s offering. “Several of the major northwestern and Cali packs are descended from that one pack.”

Scott nods. “Show me?” He asks, twisting around in a clear indication that he’s about to head towards the kitchen, and wants Theo to follow him. 

It’s a courtesy, a kindness; a way for Theo to spend a few hours distracting himself with the past so he doesn’t have to think about his present, or the immediate future looming over him where he’s going to have to figure out how to approach Liam without making their current situation any worse. Theo doesn’t know the materials that much better than Scott and Scott doesn’t actually need him there as a minimally-effective librarian’s assistant, but.

“Yeah,” Theo agrees, and gestures for Scott to lead the way. “Sure.”

\---

But as it turns out, Theo doesn’t need to figure out how to approach Liam.

“Hey,” Liam greets him dully later that night as Theo’s coming through his own front door, having just left Scott’s.

He’s laying flat on his back on Theo’s couch, his eyes fixed on the ceiling, and doesn’t bother looking over at Theo as Theo pushes past his initial hesitation and finishes stepping inside his apartment before closing and locking the door behind himself. 

“Hey,” Theo returns quietly, heeling off his shoes and slipping free of his jacket without ever taking his wary eyes off of Liam’s prone form.

His immediate instinct is to apologize for earlier, but there’s something— _eavesdropping, huh? I’d thought we’d broken you of that habit_ —inside his chest, his head, that stops him; that waits for Liam to give him some kind of cue. But it’s possible that Liam knows exactly what he’s trying to do, because he tips his head back some to look at Theo when Theo doesn’t say anything or come further into the room, and his mouth stays stubbornly shut underneath narrowed eyes. Theo exhales quietly.

“About earlier, at Scott’s,” Theo tells him, still stood just inside the door, still too unsure of his welcome inside his own apartment to come further inside. “I’m sorry. That was a private…I shouldn’t have…”

Liam’s lips quirk; he always finds it amusing when Theo’s typically silvered tongue deserts him. “Yeah, well,” he says, and lets his head fall back down so that he’s speaking the next part to the ceiling again. “Sorry for really obviously avoiding you the last few days, I guess.”

“You guess?” Theo replies dryly, half a tease. It’s out of his mouth before he can stop it, a reflexive dig, and he winces, but Liam just raises a hand to wave it lazily through the air; a dismissal.

That’s his cue, or enough of one; Theo stops hovering by the doorway and makes his way over to the couch. He goes to sit on the arm by Liam’s head—trying to thread some needle between being _close_ without being _too close_ —but Liam just sits up, some, when he’s a few steps away, and Theo recognizes the silent instruction. He sits, and Liam flops back down with his head in Theo’s lap.

“Hi,” Theo murmurs inanely, that hard ball of _something_ he’d been carrying around in his chest the last few days at Liam’s absence cracking open to spill warm relief out through his veins, but Liam’s expression just spasms.

“I asked Deaton if there was a way to change the color of a werewolf’s eyes,” he confesses abruptly, his tone a tangled mess like he’d been aiming for nonchalant but like the actual, raw _whatever_ he’s feeling had metastasized around it. 

Theo stares.

Liam jerks his gaze away from Theo’s, looking sideways as he deliberately misunderstands Theo’s stunned silence to clarify, “You know, like—like a spell or something.”

“Liam—” Theo tries, deliberate and careful because this is an absolute _minefield_ of a conversation, and he’s already fucked it up more than once.

“He said no,” Liam continues, raising his voice to drown out Theo’s attempted response. “Which seems _almost_ as dumb as the stupid rules about when eye color changes to begin with—”

He gets progressively louder as he keeps talking, his pulse quickening in parallel, and Theo has to deliberately keep his fangs behind his gums as Liam’s scent sours, fast and cloyingly. The muscles of Liam’s neck against Theo’s thigh are rigid with tension, and Theo can practically feel the way the rest of his body is vibrating with it, and even in the midst of his own tanking uncertainty some part of Theo still manages to start counting down: _five, four, three, two_ —

Liam surges to his feet.

Theo hurriedly lifts his hand out of the way to let him, but stays seated as Liam starts to pace. “Liam—” He tries, because maybe the _third_ time will be the charm, but Liam just whirls to face him and cuts a hand through the air.

“ _Don’t_ try and tell me it’s not that simple, you’re not _Scott_ ,” Liam warns, snapping it out.

“I wasn’t going to,” Theo denies quietly, a little wounded. Liam’s face falls as he apparently catches it, and he whirls around the other way and buries his fingers in his hair with a harsh, unhappy noise.

“But you agree with him,” Liam finally states, spinning back around to glare at Theo. “You _do_ think it isn’t that simple. You _do_ think my eyes should be gold.”

He flares his eyes as he says it, waving a hand by his face demonstrably. Theo holds them, an immediate, heartfelt _yes_ on his tongue, but Theo knows it _isn’t_ that simple. If—if not for exactly the reasons that Scott would think it isn’t.

“You saved my life,” Theo says instead, quietly.

Liam recoils, and then freezes, his mouth dropping open and his pinched expression slackening; he hadn’t expected that response. Theo holds his surprised stare for a second longer and then has to look away, throat bobbing. But he looks back almost instantly, because Liam makes a high, harsh noise and suddenly _launches_ himself at Theo; he has to practically vault the coffee table to do it, which in any other circumstance would be hilarious, but.

“Hey, no,” Liam protests fiercely, gripping Theo’s face between his hands and jerking it up roughly so that Theo has no real alternative but to look at him as Liam looms above him, one knee up on the couch by Theo’s hip. “ _No_. I don’t—I don’t regret _that_ ,” he insists, and then surges forward to kiss Theo _hard_ , pressing him briefly back against the back of the couch.

Theo kisses him back, but doesn’t move to deepen it, because:

“It’s just,” Liam continues, all in a breathy rush as he jerks back from Theo’s mouth. “it’s just, I mean…” He swallows, and searches Theo’s face. “You, you, _saving_ you was the first thing I thought, of _course_ it was. I wanted—I _had_ —to get her away from you, but…”

His expression crumples, and his fingers around Theo’s face spasm _hard_.

“But I didn’t know if it was already too late, if you were—if you were already _dead_ , and I wanted—I _wanted_ …”

“Revenge,” Theo fills in quietly, sure of it.

Liam’s expression twists up further and he jerks his gaze to the side, the line of his mouth starting to tremble and his jaw clenching hard. 

“It all happened so _fast_ ,” he confesses, voice barely more than a choked whisper. “I saw you there, and I saw _her_ , and I thought—I thought she’d killed you, and I…”

He stops, pain raw all over his face, and drops his forehead against Theo’s. Theo brings his hands up to gently cradle Liam’s jaw in turn. “Liam, it’s…”

But Liam doesn’t let him finish. “And it wasn’t just you!” He suddenly adds, all in a hoarse rush as he leans back some to catch Theo’s eyes again. “It was—it was _Brett_ , and _Lori_ , and all the other supernaturals Monroe and her people killed. It was—it was…”

 _Me_ , Theo hears, even though Liam doesn’t say it; it was Liam, and all the grief, and despair, and hopelessness he’d felt throughout Monroe’s never-brief-enough reign of terror. The alienation he’d felt as the town turned against him and the rest of its supernatural citizens. The beating Liam had been forced to take to protect himself and the rest of the McCall pack. 

The self-doubt that Theo _knows_ Liam must have felt— _I’m a monster_ , said to Scott that one time after Scott had been forced to turn him, and no matter Scott’s heartfelt denial, and never, _never_ fully forgotten.

“I wanted to kill her,” Liam confesses, barely more than a whisper. “I _wanted_ to. And I—I did.”

Theo can hear the attempted punctuation Liam’s attempting to put on that statement: he wanted to kill her, and he did. Full stop. Whatever other reasons, or justifications, that Liam or anyone else—that Scott, or Theo, or anyone—could come up with, that’s the part that mattered. 

That’s the only part that Liam was maybe willing to _let_ matter.

“My eyes should be blue, Theo,” Liam insists hoarsely. “Whatever some stupid moon magic thinks, they _should be—_ ”

Theo cuts him off. Theo _has_ to cut him off. He pulls Liam down into a harsh, insistent kiss, and holds him there through Liam’s first, reflexive jerk backwards. He’d let him go if Liam tried to pull away a second time but Liam doesn’t, instead just making a helpless noise and pressing in closer, getting his other knee up on the couch to let Theo pull him in as tightly to himself as he can. 

Theo holds him there until he feels Liam’s heaving shoulders start to relax; until he feels Liam’s pounding pulse against his own chest start to slow. Liam starts to sag, some, against him, some of the tension starting to leak out of him like poison running free of a lanced wound, and only then does Theo pull back.

“Scott’s right, Liam,” Theo tells him, and holds him firm when Liam makes a face and tries to jerk back. “ _Hey_. _Listen_ to me. Scott’s right, and it’s not that simple. _Nothing_ is ever that simple.” He strokes a hand down Liam’s face when Liam glances reluctantly back at him, concluding softly, “Nothing is ever that black and white.” Then, lips flickering helplessly in an expression caught somewhere between a smile and a grimace, he corrects, “Nothing is ever that _gold_ and _blue_.”

Liam’s lips flicker in an equally-helpless, equally-confused hybrid of a smile and a grimace. But after a few dragged-out seconds his expression goes a little distant, a little thoughtful, and he brings one of his hands forward to trace his fingers delicately under Theo’s left eye.

“I guess—I guess you’d know as well as I would,” He offers, overly careful in a way that tells Theo that he’s playing a hunch; that he’s testing the edges of a revelation that he thinks he’s had, some secret that he thinks he’s discovered. Theo feels his expression slacken with surprise.

And then it tightens right back up.

“ _No_ ,” He insists fiercely, practically snarling it out as he surges upward, Liam startling above him but reacting too slow to stop Theo from twisting them around and down to pin Liam against the couch on his back, Theo hovering above him and glaring down at him. “No. You and I are _not_ the same.”

Liam’s brow furrows, and he tries to reach hesitantly up for Theo’s face. “Theo…” 

“ _Liam_ ,” Theo snaps, cutting him off and catching his hand so that he can pin it back down to the cushions. “ _Listen to me_. Whatever else Monroe was, whatever else your reasons for killing her beyond what you think are _acceptable_ ones, she was still a genocidal maniac with the blood of _dozens_ of innocent people on her hands.”

Liam stares up at him, his mouth falling softly open. Theo feels his own expression twist, but he just grits his teeth and doesn’t let up.

“Josh and—and Tracy, and the rest of the Doctor’s and Beast’s victims,” Theo continues forcefully, with only the slightest break on Josh’s and Tracy’s names, “they weren’t. You _know_ they weren’t,” he insists, even though Liam hadn’t moved to argue with him; hadn’t moved at all, in fact. 

Theo can’t keep looking him in the eye, suddenly. He drops his head down loose on his neck, and then sits back up on his heels, his hands coming up over his mouth. Liam starts to rise up on one elbow, but stops when Theo looks at him.

“My eyes aren’t gold because some _stupid moon magic_ ,” Theo says, deliberately quoting Liam, “decided my victims—victim _s_ , Liam, _plural_ —weren’t innocent.” He swallows, and has to look away again. “They’re gold because the Doctors— _perverted_ that magic, when they made me.”

He hears but doesn’t have time to react to Liam sitting all of the way back up and _launching_ himself at Theo, again; Liam moves too quickly, _supernaturally_ quickly. Theo starts to pull away from the tight embrace, his whole body feeling like a raw nerve, but after an initial split-second of hesitation he instead reverses direction and surges into Liam instead, holding him just as tightly as Liam is holding him.

They stay like that for a good few minutes, and then Liam suddenly turns and presses his forehead _hard_ against the edge of Theo’s jaw. “I don’t even know why I _care_ ,” He confesses in barely more than a broken whisper. “She was a murderous bitch. She was literally trying to _kill you_. She—she _deserved_ it, and more.”

Theo pulls back some to look at him, his eyes studying the pained rictus of Liam’s expression. “Yeah, she was, and she did,” he agrees quietly. “But I don’t think…I don’t think it’s her you’re mourning.”

Liam looks blankly surprised for a second as he apparently realizes what Theo means, and then his face _crumples_ into a raw, anguished expression, and he gives a single, harsh sob before launching himself back forward to bury his face in Theo’s chest. Theo catches him, and wraps his arms tightly around Liam’s shoulders, and presses his own face to the crown of Liam’s head as Liam shakes, and shakes, and shakes.

He just wraps his arms around him, and holds on.

\---

Liam winds up falling asleep like that; they both do. 

Theo wakes up maybe an hour later with his neck aching from the awkward position, and Liam a heavy, sprawled-out weight on his chest. He realizes what had happened quickly and immediately tries to relax best he’s able to keep from waking Liam up, but it’s a wasted effort; Liam grumbles a complaint and stirs. Theo smiles slightly at him when Liam turns his head to squint up at him, his chin digging into Theo’s sternum and his breath skating over the skin of Theo’s cheek.

“Hi,” he says.

“Morning,” Theo tells him, primarily because it’s clearly dark out through the massive windows of his living room, and it’ll make Liam do exactly what it does: Liam rolls his eyes, and purposefully digs his chin a little harder against Theo’s chest until Theo grunts and palms his forehead to make him stop.

And then he sits up, pushing himself up with a hand on either side of Theo’s ribs. “I’m gross,” he announces, making a face.

He’s really not. Theo has _seen him_ gross, usually after lacrosse and/or after a supernatural monster hunt, and he’s practically glowing in comparison. But Theo’s pretty sure he knows what Liam’s referring to, and why he’s saying it, so he just nods, and doesn’t protest when Liam gives him a flicker of a smile and clambers off his chest. 

He stays on the couch as Liam heads up to shower, and winds up falling asleep again within minutes.

He wakes up again to Liam dropping back down onto the couch—and half onto Theo’s stomach—and he _oofs_ helplessly and jerks some; Liam smirks. Theo rolls his eyes and knees him—relatively—gently in the side of the ribs as payback. Liam just smirks wider and then twists around so he can flop back flat with his back to Theo’s chest, and pointedly ignores Theo’s complaint when Liam’s wet hair starts soaking through his shirt and sticking annoyingly to the side of his neck.

“What’re we eating?” He demands, wiggling around as he apparently tries to get comfortable, and mostly just manages to poke Theo repeatedly in sensitive places with his elbows.

“Whatever you’re ordering,” Theo shoots back, and eventually gives up on humoring Liam and shoves him off the couch, and onto the floor. Liam gives a hilarious, half-swallowed squawk as he goes, and then immediately reaches up to try and smack Theo in retaliation; Theo leans back out of the way, grinning widely in amusement at Liam’s ridiculous and entirely ineffectual flailing. 

The next day Agent McCall calls from San Francisco looking for a consult, and Theo winds up spending four incredibly dusty days running around the California-Mexico border with him and Argent, and all while experiencing the dubious honor of meeting Araya Calaveras and her clan after the case takes—as McCall suspected—a turn for the supernatural-related. He gets back late the fourth night, exhausted and travel-weary and still feeling uncomfortably cramped up from the long drive back, and rolls his front door back shut behind himself with zero other plans other than going straight upstairs and falling into bed.

But he can see a sliver of his kitchen through the doorway, including a section of counter, and his brow furrows as he spots something sitting in the middle of it that he doesn’t recognize. Frowning—and with his adrenaline making a valiant effort to rally his limbs even with their leadened state—Theo tosses his duffel bag to the side and then heads for the kitchen, more than a little wary. 

He relaxes quickly, though.

“What the hell,” He murmurs to himself, and picks up the small black ring box.

It’s clearly Liam’s. Or from him, anyway; Theo can tell from the scent. It’s different than it usually is, though, more layered, and Theo spends a minute or so turning the box over in his hands and picking at Liam’s scent soaked into it, trying to figure out exactly _what’s_ different, before his phone suddenly vibrates in his pocket. 

It’s Liam, unsurprisingly, apparently extrapolating out from the best-guess ETA that Theo had given him for his arrival back in Beacon Hills and landing pretty close to the mark. Theo thumbs open the text message, expecting an explanation for the still-unopened ring box that Liam had clearly left on his counter, but what actually pops up is a picture of Liam, sprawled back in his bed with his shirt off and one hand draped lightly over his mouth. Eyebrows climbing, Theo’s about to text back _thanks for the tease, you asshole_ , when something about the picture catches his attention, and he stops.

He’s still squinting at the thin silver bracelet around Liam’s wrist, the narrow flat surface of it inlaid with bright blue stones, when a second message comes through. 

_Fuck some stupid moon magic_ , it says. _We make our own rules_.

Theo sucks in a harsh, caught breath, and drops his phone carelessly to the side so he can use both hands to open the ring box. Inside is a simple silver ring, the surface smooth and unmarked except for the four bright blue stones inlaid equidistant around the band. He spends a stunned half minute just staring down at it, and then his lips pull in a helpless, wide smile, and he sets the box down so he can carefully lift the ring out of it, weigh it in thoughtfully in his palm.

And then he puts it on.

**Author's Note:**

> All feedback loved! If you liked, please consider a comment or [reblog](https://eneiryu.tumblr.com/post/189908158050/hold-to-your-promise-hold-to-the-line-eneiryu)!


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